Layovers: the bane of many travelers’ existence. Fortunately, most airlines now let passengers choose their layover location. Flying from New York to Hawaii? You’ll likely need to stop somewhere in the middle, but you’ll get options ranging from San Francisco to Denver, Houston and more. This got me thinking: Which airport provides the best layover experience?
Layovers: the bane of many travelers’ existence. Fortunately, most airlines now let passengers choose their layover location. Flying from New York to Hawaii? You’ll likely need to stop somewhere in the middle, but you’ll get options ranging from San Francisco to Denver, Houston and more. This got me thinking: Which airport provides the best layover experience?
To determine the ultimate layover location we used our program (Cotera) to run a sentiment analysis on thousands of Google Reviews for the 5 most common layover airports: JFK, LAX, ORD, DEN and SFO. We filtered out reviews that were irrelevant to layovers (eg. TSA speed) and focused on the 5 attributes we thought were most relevant:
Overall SFO comes in at #1 for best layover airport with top notch cleanliness, customer service and food. JFK ranks last with busyness and customer service being big issues.
However, when we break down positive and negative sentiment by category we see that overall sentiment doesn’t paint the full picture. Amongst the 5 airports there’s significant differences in each one’s respective strengths/weaknesses with SFO only placing first in one category.
From this breakdown, it’s clear that the “best” airport really depends on what attribute we’re looking at. Here’s a summary of the winners and losers of each category:
Although SFO wins the overall “best layover” title, the ideal airport for you depends on your priorities:
Our analysis reveals that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for the perfect layover airport. Your ideal choice ultimately depends on your personal preferences and travel needs.